by David Masiel
“Okay, so that’s the plan. First stop, Luanda.”
“Another fucking shit hole. I should kill your ass for bringing me to this part of the world, Snow.”
He said it as a joke, but Snow knew it wasn’t far off the mark for Bracelin. He thought about all the times he was convinced he’d die and didn’t, and about being cornered and what he was capable of, and how maybe living a moral life was about not getting cornered, because deep inside you knew how you’d come out, if you had it in you to kill a man.
He felt bad about the pilot, worse than he’d ever felt about business like that. He supposed he could blame the kid for ushering that Slaney along, even if it was only to Freetown. He felt an odd lack of anger toward the kid, even knowing the man couldn’t have tracked the ship without his help. Now they’d all pay for it. He guessed it was how it ought to be, except that there were still innocents he wanted to protect, still Beth, even if she didn’t want his help. It was all such sickening business, he wanted to know how he could stop it, he begged to know how. Please tell me how, please. He had no idea to whom he was even begging. The image of Van Sickle came at him now, that marlin spike concealed up behind his wrist. What if there really were spirits out there? What if Van Sickle really had come for Joaquin on his deathbed, what would that mean for him? Who would come for him? A shiver wracked his body and he wriggled out of it, did what he always did at moments like this. He tried not to think. Let Bracelin do that, let Bracelin think of the pilot and what he did to him and where he put him when he was finished. Maybe Slaney was still out there floating or treading water and coming for them. Maybe you couldn’t stop a man like that, couldn’t really break a neck like that. Through the door to the dayroom, Snow could see Paynor sleeping in there, his lips pursed as he let out air, like he was kissing some lover in his dreams.
Snow left Bracelin on the bridge. On the way out he checked the anemometer, saw that winds were pushing fifteen knots now, with the barometer on a free fall. Stepping out to the bridge wing, Snow felt the fresh wind blow at his hair, a cooling wind at least, though up ahead rising cumulonimbus clouds vaulted to the stratosphere and flattened off into anvil heads. Snow felt small all of a sudden, hunkered down. He looked out the long foredeck, and even now, with the waves rising to ten feet, he could see the hull flexing, sagging amidships as they moved into the trough, a motion he felt in his own belly, like the both of them would bust a gut down deep. He’d look for the kids to start a ballast operation, get the ship trimmed up. They should have done it sooner, he thought, as he started down the outside stairs from the bridge wing to the poop deck, where to his own surprise he found himself hoping, really hoping, there was no God.
HORSE LATITUDES
He couldn’t hope long. Descending the ladder from the poop deck, Snow felt a glowing and crackling sensation, rolling up his face and over his head and down his back like electric flickers of truth. The ringing in his left ear had graduated from a popping sound to where he now heard voices. He heard old Joaquin grumble, felt somebody shaking his foot to wake up saying time to turn-to now, Snowman, time to turn-to and stand your watch, you’re on lookout!
Awake was the last thing Snow felt. He walked in baby steps, as if one stride of his long legs would throw him out of control and he’d somehow walk right overboard. As he stepped out the centerline catwalk, he looked up to the bridge where the face of Bracelin loomed behind the glass, his eyes picking up Snow’s movement, and glaring.
Snow went searching for the kid, walked the decks in a kind of daze. He saw people out there—a ton of people, people of the past. They were all around now, stepping out from behind stanchions and vent stacks, curling around valve stems and pipelines. A Viet bar girl in a miniskirt. A thousand Hindus naked, black mouths, wild salt-caked hair. He couldn’t find the kid anywhere. He searched for Beth, but couldn’t find her either. He searched for Leeds—he’d be in the engine room standing at the control panels with his dim mak and useless hands. Old Joaquin kept up, with his hand there shaking his foot, saying time to turn-to, Snowman, time-to, turn-to. Snow could hear him in both ears.
In the here and now, the crew had evaporated. A six-hundred-foot tanker and they were all gone from sight, and he figured it could go that way now, one by one, until he never saw any of them again. If he were Bracelin what would he be thinking? If he were Bracelin he’d need the crew as long as the crew was useful.
Stepping down the catwalk he felt it flex and creak as the ship labored over rising waves. As the pilot had noted, this was a T-2, a rare breed because most of the rest had been turned into Chevrolets. Like Liberty ships they were all welded, disposable tin cans that broke in half often as not until they took to riveting straps along the side shell fore to aft. Rivets that creaked inside his own skull, like popping in a deaf ear. The catwalk chattered and the wind pulled at his hair as if someone had grabbed a fistful to haul him around deck like a slave. The pain spread down and through his skull. He stood in the wind at the midship line, just over the manifold, and heard a deluge of sounds that transformed in his brain to scrapes and groans, pops and clicks. People shouted at him. They crowded out of nowhere talking in tongues, mumbling Sanskrit and Latin and ancient Greek, Chinese and Malay. Riveted straps or not, Snow felt Elisabeth ready to break open down under. She’d founder before anybody knew what had happened. “That strap goes, she’ll unzip like a whore’s skirt,” he said aloud to no one, but heard Joaquin answer in his deathbed rasp, Goddamn you anyhow, Snow—except for you I’d a made heaven!
Snow thought of maybe calling Leeds to get his take, but that would mean nobody to man the engine room. Maybe the new Liberian was down there—Danny. No, Jimmy was his name. The other one was Danny. Danny was on the helm with Bracelin and Paynor. Then he saw Joaquin Maciel striding the deck stowing work gear, holding monkey wrenches in his fists and a marlin spike tucked up behind his rain gear until it turned into the kid, turned into George.
George was a worker now, nose to the grindstone, don’t look up, don’t notice, don’t be noticed. He moved past, grim, a downcast look on his face, and Snow thought right then the kid was capable of killing a man. He wondered how far he’d thought it through. He wondered if the kid really understood and was already mapping it out. He wondered if something horrible weren’t happening before his eyes, that lost boy on a porch, how that must have felt, how that must have felt to hear Grandma wailing the news of your father’s demise.
Around the forward side of the midship square stood Beth, strategically out of view of the bridge and looking like somebody had been chasing her or was about to start. “Harold,” she said. “I went down to open internals and found the midship wing tank full of water.”
“We already ballasted it?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Where’s the kid?”
“He just walked right past you.”
“Yeah—” Snow peered past the midship square and up to the bridge, saw Bracelin still, then down the other way, forward up the pipeline. “That’s right—but where the hell is he?”
“In the pump room setting ballast pumps. Mate’s orders.”
They went down to the weather deck, and Snow paused to put his left hand to his hip while his right hand held the railing. The ship rolled all around him. He felt the steel pipe of the railing quiver up from its base on the weather deck below. Beth moved down ahead of him and then looked back up the stairs and waited, waves and wind engulfing the scene behind her. He made his way slowly down to the weather deck, holding tight to the railing and not sure he could even stay aboard. Like the whole ship, the whole ocean was shaking its back to rid itself of him, to toss him off.
He faced five easy steps to the watertight door of the tankerman’s locker. He gathered himself and stepped toward the door, counting inside his head as he made his way into the room ahead of Beth, who followed up and dogged the door shut against the waves that washed the weather deck. A steady dribble leaked at the base, no matter how you dogged it; bent
steel was bent steel and the whole ship was askew, not a square door in the thing.
“You look like you got something,” she said.
“I got that rad poisoning thirty-five years late.”
Down on the main deck now, Snow felt the sagging action worse than he had above. Water in the wing was a problem because they couldn’t get to any damaged framing to repair it, and the only conclusion he could draw was that they had a side shell split below waterline. They needed to get all available ballast pumps running on those wings, he thought. He had to get Leeds up here. He himself could stand a watch in the engine room.
“We can’t do what we need to do in this weather,” he said. “Squall should be past in an hour.”
“Hour can be a long time.”
“For an old bag of bones like this ship,” Snow said, and even as he talked he felt the whole ship bloat out into the sky, but as soon as he felt the ship rising he realized he was up above it all alone, the ship below him, stretching out. One hour was a long time when six hundred feet of steel flexed and twisted and quivered through every trough and crest. Lightning cracked and exploded all around. Then he was grounded all at once, down inside the tankerman’s locker with Beth holding his hand. He turned to look at her and knew he’d been afraid to look since Nimba Mountain for fear of seeing the father in her eyes, but now he looked and she was just Beth and both their hands were wet and warm. Until he said, “Listen, I got a feeling I know what Bracelin’s going to do. We gotta keep an eye out. If he thinks this ship won’t make it, we’re all gonna have a common problem.”
She nodded without a word, her lips set and round. Then the door opened in a rush of water and rain, fat droplets flying sideways and splattering over the workbench, and the kid stepped inside fast and slammed the door shut. He tried like hell to dog that door so it wouldn’t leak, but after he’d resigned himself to failure, he turned to Snow. “I got the ballast pumps going. We’re putting water into the number-two tanks all the way across.”
“Good work,” Snow said.
The kid stared at him like there was a badge on Snow’s forehead saying PUT ME OUT OF MY MISERY. “You feeling okay, Harold?”
“Jesus Christ leave me alone,” said Snow, and pulled in a deep breath. “Now we gotta get ballast out of the wings. Get submersible pumps coming out of every hole that tank’s got. Stuff 3-M pads to seal up the gaps where the hose comes out the hole, any way you can, so we don’t take on as much as we pump out.”
As Maciel stepped out, Snow could see he was packing one of them ax handles as well as his locking knife, which he wore in an open sheath. Snow figured him for one other knife, a smaller locking one in the front pocket of his Friscos. He guessed maybe the kid would need all that, he guessed he felt bad now for snapping at him.
“Hey, George,” he said. “I know that insurance guy pushed you. I know how that feels. I don’t blame you. You’re a helluva good hand. You can be on my crew any day.”
The kid looked at him. “Thanks, Harold.” Then he was out.
When the squall ended, it ended fast. By dusk, the doldrums were upon them. Night settled, cool from the passing storm, and on the bridge, the mates glowed red in the chart light. Below, the deck crew, led by a slow-moving Snow, went about their work. They steamed south now into a flat-calm sea, water spewing from hoses wired off to the cable railing, like a half dozen fire hoses emptying the wing tanks of water.
Snow smelled fresh diesel. His nose drew him aft, where he peered over the side to see a flat stream of fuel two feet wide spurting from the side shell. He keyed his mike and called for the engineer and the chief mate both. “She’s got a side-shell crack at the port diesel tank,” he said into the radio. “And likely another at the midship wing.”
The ship came to all stop and everybody gathered, including the Liberians, the crew standing there watching the fuel escape. Vapors drifted on airs. The plume of a rainbow slick spread through the water in the glow of work lights, which drew dolphin fish in a school that swung past and glittered like gold knives in black water. There for the taking, Snow thought, if only he had any sinkers left. Then he looked up and saw the mate striding toward him in those gold coveralls, radio around his chest.
“Lucky it’s night,” said Leeds.
“Why’s that?” said Maciel.
“’Cause welding that sucker up on a hot day would be a risk.”
“Welding it up?” the kid said, incredulous. “You’re going to weld a tank full of fuel?”
Bracelin looked over at the kid like who the fuck was this guy anyhow. “You know, you really do need to learn to shut your fucking trap.”
“There’s only one way to shut that spigot off,” said Leeds. “And that’s to hang down there on a bos’n’s chair and weld the sucker. So, like I say, we’re lucky it’s night. Tanks full, theoretically we should be okay.”
Something in Leeds made you wonder if the steel in his head was riveted in place or if it wasn’t just free-floating on the surface of his brain. Beth went for the harness and helped Leeds strap it on, all the while Leeds saying, “I never knew you cared, Liz, I never knew you cared.”
“We’re losing fifteen gallons of fuel a minute,” Bracelin said. “So whatever you do, do it now.” Then he went forward with a sounding tape to check first the midship de-ballasting, followed by the number 2 tank ballasting operation. As soon as Bracelin was out of earshot, Maciel said, “There’s got to be another way.”
“It’ll probably be all right,” said Leeds, and winked.
“How about we pump the contents into another tank, gas-free this one, and then weld it?” said the kid.
Leeds sat with his legs dangling over the side. He frowned like he had some trouble with the idea, but he couldn’t quite put a name to it. “That’ll take too long,” he finally said. “Just string my leads and get a case of jet rod. There’s a portable machine in that aft boatswain’s locker.”
“And you’re sure it won’t blow up?”
“You can never be completely sure of a thing like that,” said Leeds.
Maciel threw up his hands. “I hope you know what you’re doing!” he said, and went for the boatswain’s locker.
“I know what I’m doing,” said Leeds. “That don’t mean I know what’s going to happen.”
Snow couldn’t even engage the debate in his own mind. He moved over and leaned his back against the house and slid down to his ass and sat there. Sparklers appeared, little fireflies swirling past his field of vision. He felt blood coursing into his head. He sat there smelling the ship until Maciel arrived, lugging the small welding machine. He set it on deck and lit it off, the engine sputtering and then gathering steam. Thirty seconds later it was zipping along clear and high. Snow shoved himself off the deck and went to help Beth rig the harness to lower Leeds over the side. They tied the line off to the nearest cleat and Leeds rappelled over and waited next to the stream of diesel, while Maciel lowered his stinger down, saying, “There’s no way I can talk you out of this?”
“You could run like hell if you’re inclined.”
“That’s what I do, by God!” said Jimmy, leaning out to watch the flow of diesel. “I run to the goddamned bow!” And he did just that.
But Maciel didn’t run, and Snow couldn’t have run in any case. Along with Beth and Momo, they hung out over the side, wanting to see what happened, or maybe wanting it to end fast if it did. In the din of the welding machine, Snow heard more voices. They started doubling up on themselves, voices he recognized and could even put faces to. One of them sounded like Snow himself, yelling off in some far corner of the ship, words he couldn’t understand.
“Okay!” Leeds yelled from over the side. “Here I go!”
Then he touched the stinger and the flat stream caught fire in a burst, at which point Momo hightailed it out of there. Flames jetted and hissed three feet, shooting out of the ship’s side like a flat-edged flamethrower. Maciel moved off to the boatswain’s locker and retrieved a welder’s mask,
handing it to Snow so he could watch the progress. Snow stared through the thick welder’s glass. The eerie phosphor-green glow, the dancing bead of white molten steel, and the leaping flames like cool negatives—there was no sense of the danger until Snow removed the hood and watched Leeds down there dangling by a nylon line, flames pouring past his hand as if the ship carried a cargo of fire.
It took twenty minutes to weld the split. As he neared the end and closed the leak off, the flow of fuel ended, and the flames sputtered out. Leeds tipped his mask back and looked up at Maciel. “Told ya so, naysayer!”
When Bracelin came back, he peered down over the side. “You are one balls-out motherfucker.”
“I noticed you were nowhere to be found,” said Leeds, climbing back over the bulwarks.
“Only an idiot goes to the beach to watch a tsunami. You note the Liberians vacated.”
“That’s ’cause they have sense,” said Snow.
“So what’s your take on this split,” Bracelin asked. “We got more?”
“Probably,” said Leeds. “If not now, then soon.”
“How many of them line squalls can she survive? What about rounding the Cape?”
“Who knows? All depends. We hit some bad shit—probably not.”
Snow watched as Bracelin snarled and gazed around ship. The tanks were coming up slowly, he said. Too slowly. “My bet we got bulkhead breaks down under and we’re ballasting more than just the number-two line. Snow, send the chick down to find out.”
Snow knew where Bracelin’s mind was going. He was already moving past Plan B and formulating Plan C, whatever it was. He’d probably lift it off his arm tattoos. “What the fuck you carrying in that pack, old man?” Bracelin asked, and slapped at it.
Snow was wearing the pack around without thinking about it, and now his irritation at the mate simply emerged from his mouth. “Well that’s none a your business, Mate.”
Bracelin’s lips went angular then, just as flat and shut as a smile on a clamshell. He turned and marched up the outer stairs toward the bridge, where he moved over the bullet raft, pitched there on an incline, and leaned over to inspect the door seal. He dug at it with his thumbnail and out came a chunk of old rubber. He flicked the piece aside, and moved topside.